Zanbato Inc., an infrastructure software platform company, has raised approximately $3 million in its first institutional funding from the Alberta Investment Management Corp. and undisclosed individual investors to expand its online marketplace presence.

European banks have long been the dominant force in global project finance, but they are now rapidly retreating from the market due to several major crises. What will fill the void left by these major players in infrastructure financing?

Ryan Orris the executive director of the Collaboratory for Research on Global Projects, a multidisciplinary research center at Stanford University that focuses on advancing the finance, delivery and governance of infrastructure, and he is the CEO of Zanbato Inc., a Silicon Valley–based start-up that has developed an infrastructure software platform that allows qualified market participants to connect and source new investment opportunities. Institutional Investing in Infrastructurecontributing editor Tyson Freeman spoke with Orr about his work and infrastructure investment markets

The I3 Editorial Advisory Board meeting is a forum for investors, consultants, investment managers and guests to communicate their expectations, challenges and concerns with respect to infrastructure investing. The process helps these groups communicate and work together to achieve their goals and objectives, providing a platform to share experience as well as help drive the editorial content for the I3publication. The board meeting includes eight hours of discussions, quick tally votes on topics of interest and opportunities to build stronger relationships. This is the second part of a review of the board meeting discussions that took place Nov. 9–10, 2011, in Chicago.

During fourth quarter 2011, most management teams across industries completed business planning for the year ahead and challenged themselves: “How will we deliver better value than the competition? How can we best support our market and all its participants?” and, most importantly, “How will we generate the revenue needed to do these things on an ongoing basis?”

The idea of a national infrastructure bank was first introduced in Congress almost two decades ago, and, earlier this year, it looked like it might finally pass. The BUILD Act, which would create a non-political national infrastructure bank, was conceived by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., and had bipartisan support in the Senate, where it was also sponsored by Sens. Kaye Bailey Hutchinson, R-Texas; Lindsay Graham, R-S.C.; and Mark Warner, D-Va. It was strongly backed by President Barack Obama, who had first talked about the concept during the 2008 presidential campaign and again in 2011. The BUILD Act and the bank also had the rarely seen combined support of both organized labor and the business community. Both the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce endorsed it.